Tag: Annie Leibovitz

  • Rachel Cooke on the Annie Leibovitz film, Life Through a Lens | Art & Architecture | Guardian Unlimited Arts

    There are lots of reasons why making a film about Annie Leibovitz, our most famous living photographer, may be a bit intimidating. For one thing, photography is essentially static, so how to bring it to life on screen? For another, Leibovitz has something of a reputation.
    Graydon Carter, her boss at Vanity Fair, likens her to ‘Barbra Streisand with a camera’, which is possibly shorthand for ‘she’s a nightmare on legs!’ (I’m guessing that he isn’t referring to her singing.) Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue, admits that, yes, Annie is demanding, that the idea of ‘budget is not something that enters into her consciousness’, before quickly adding that she is worth it because ‘she cares! she cares!’ Even Leibovitz’s flesh and blood, in this case, her sister Paula, confesses: ‘You don’t want to be anywhere near her when she’s taking pictures.’

    Check it out here.

  • From Annie Leibovitz: Life, and Death, Examined

    From Annie Leibovitz: Life, and Death, Examined

    NYT:

    In 1998 Ms. Sontag received a diagnosis of cancer, from which she recovered. Ms. Leibovitz took several months off to be with her. There are photographs of that period too, of Ms. Sontag receiving chemotherapy, having her hair cut. “You know, one doesn’t stop seeing,” Ms. Leibovitz said, when asked about her impulse to photograph illness. “One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.” In the middle of her Caesarean in 2001 she reached up with a camera to try to shoot the birth of her daughter, Sarah, over the curtain suspended across her midriff. “They’re all totally out of focus and terrible,” she laughed.

    She photographed her father after his death in 2005. He was 91, had lung cancer and had driven a car until a week before. He died at home in bed, with hospice care, in his wife’s arms. The family kept his body in the bedroom all day, as children and, later, a rabbi arrived. Ms. Leibovitz photographed him there, his head on a flowered pillowcase, in pajamas with dark piping. “You find yourself reverting to what you know,” she said. “It’s almost like a protection of some kind. You go back into yourself. You don’t really know quite what you’re doing. I didn’t really analyze it. I felt driven to do it.”
    She said, “My father was so beautiful lying there.”

    Here.